Musing 29

There’s a common fallacy I see frequently among those who are well-read that often make us . .. less than charitable in our interaction.

That fallacy goes essentially like this.

People are talking about issue A. Historically, I’ve read that A leads to B and C on a consistent basis. B and C are bad things. Because this is obvious to me, someone who is a plebeian in the grand scheme of things, this must be obvious to everyone. Because this is obvious to everyone, only a foolish person or someone maliciously trying to cause B and C would disagree. People disagree with me. Therefore, they are fools or malicious.

Most often, I see this on the right with people calling out the consequences of socialism or electing Democrats (see all those “this is your city on Democrats” memes, never mind the fact that there are many counterexamples of Republican areas being run into the ground). But that isn’t to say the left doesn’t have their jabs as well (though more often without the attempted humor in their memes).

I haven’t looked to see if there’s a name for this type of fallacy (aside from the clear ad hominem at the end, of course), but it’s a fallacious thought process I have seen on multiple occasions keep meaningful discussions from happening because at least one of the people involved immediately jumped to the conclusion and became way too aggressive (and sometimes that person was me in my younger days, I am forced to admit).

But what makes this thought process so easy to fall into?

First, I think it’s because people who are well-read can forget that not everyone is as well-read as they are. We all can unintentionally fall into the pattern of “well, I’m normal, so other people must have this level of knowledge as well” . . . and as I’ve found out over and over in life, that is most assuredly NOT the case. And so we need to remember to give people grace to be able to make the connections we have.

Second has to do with the 2nd and 3rd statements. It is possible that B and C aren’t as clearly related to A as we’ve been lead to believe, or have other factors involved. Another significant possibility we often forget is that sometimes, B and C are better than the other possible outcomes we learn about in history, as distasteful as B and C may be. And so people, while not happy with those outcomes, tolerate it to avoid worse consequences.

These 2 considerations end up exposing why the latter half of this thought process ends up being problematic. For example, in my experience most people do not have a truly cohesive view of politics. Instead, they build their views on issues in response to the struggles they face in life (no matter how first-world those struggles may be). And so, they may support A without even realizing that B and C are even in the same ballpark as A. And so how can people who are, in good faith (if an ignorant faith), speaking on a singular topic in isolation be assumed to be malicious or foolish in coming to that conclusion in the general case?

To ground this conversation a bit in concrete examples - when people come to their conclusions about a topic like government run healthcare or student loan forgiveness, it’s often not out of a process of examining their principles and working out from those principles to a conclusion on these topics. They instead tend to come at an issue from the perspective of “this is an issue that has caused difficulty in my life, and this person (whether politician running for office, talking head whose commenting from the sidelines, or some other relationship) says they have a solution for that problem which will bring me relief”. And we should not overlook how powerful the promise of rest in our busy age is. People are desperate for relief from the burdens of life and so they elect the person who they think is most likely to give that relief.

And so to bring this home - this fallacy is most damaging because it shows us presuming that we can know a person’s heart by their favored solution towards earthly problem. While we might rightly attribute malice to someone on occasion, that doesn’t take away the fact that we are not given the right to judge in that way. Looking upon the heart is God’s domain, not ours. And to presume on that puts our own souls in danger.